The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck eBook

XII

It was excellent to see Jack Charteris again, as Colonel
Musgrave did within a few days of this. Musgrave
was unreasonably fond of the novelist and frankly
confessed it would be as preposterous to connect Charteris
with any of the accepted standards of morality as it
would be to judge an artesian-well from the standpoint
of ethics.

Anne was not yet in Lichfield. She had broken
the journey to visit a maternal grand-aunt and some
Virginia cousins, in Richmond, Charteris explained,
and was to come thence to Matocton.

“And so you have acquired a boy and, by my soul,
a very handsome wife, Rudolph?”

“It is sufficiently notorious,” said Colonel
Musgrave. “Yes, we are quite absurdly happy.”
He laughed and added: “Patricia—­but
you don’t know her droll way of putting things—­says
that the only rational complaint I can advance against
her is her habit of rushing into a hospital every
month or so and having a section or two of her person
removed by surgeons. It worries me,—­only,
of course, it is not the sort of thing you can talk
about. And, as Patricia says, it is an
unpleasant thing to realize that your wife is not leaving
you through the ordinary channels of death or of type-written
decrees of the court, but only in vulgar fractions,
as it were—­”

“Please don’t be quite so brutal, Rudolph.
It is not becoming in a Musgrave of Matocton to speak
of women in any tone other than the most honeyed accents
of chivalry.”

“Oh, I was only quoting Patricia,” the
colonel largely said, “and—­er—­Jack,”
he continued. “By the way, Jack, Clarice
Pendomer will be at Matocton—­”

“I rejoice in her good luck,” said Charteris,
equably.

“—­and—­well! I was
wondering—?”

“I can assure you that there will be no—­trouble.
That skeleton is safely locked in its closet, and
the key to that closet is missing—­more
thanks to you. You acted very nobly in the whole
affair, Rudolph. I wish I could do things like
that. As it is, of course, I shall always detest
you for having been able to do it.”

Charteris said, thereafter: “I shall always
envy you, though, Rudolph. No other man I know
has ever attained the good old troubadourish ideal
of domnei—­that love which rather
abhors than otherwise the notion of possessing its
object. I still believe it was a distinct relief
to a certain military officer, whose name we need
not mention, when Anne decided not to marry you.”

The colonel grinned, a trifle consciously. “Well,
Anne meant youth, you comprehend, and all the things
we then believed in, Jack. It would have been
decidedly difficult to live up to such a contract,
and—­as it were—­to fulfil every
one of the implied specifications!”

“And yet”—­here Charteris flicked
his cigarette—­“Anne ruled in the
stead of Aline Van Orden. And Aline, in turn,
had followed Clarice Pendomer. And before the
coming of Clarice had Pauline Romeyne, whom time has
converted into Polly Ashmeade, reigned in the land—­”